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The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

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Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#11

Post by digi_owl »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #6

It still blows my mind that Tribes came out in 1998. That was a game with vehicles, easy modding (Tribes Football, RPG, Shifter, Renegades, anyone?), incredible mechanics (skiing), massive maps, recordable gameplay, a very active competitive community (OGL, 5150, players like Natural), And it was very playable on a 56k with some servers supporting 64+ players. Frankly, it puts a lot of titles with massive budgets, de…

Best i can tell, most of the dev team and budget is dedicated to the art side of the game. Meaning maps, models, sound etc.

And 18 years of learning? Sorry but most of the people and companies from back then are long gone. Best i can tell there are very few game development courses out there, and fewer still focus on the network plumbing.

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#12

Post by mey »

stevebmark wrote: post #10

Part of why Tribes was such an incredible experience was it had 64 player servers. The maps were constant chaos. Haven't quite experienced anything like that since.

PlanetSide and PlanetSide 2. While hard to get into, when platoon level operations are at their best it's something I've yet to experience in another game. I expect Eve would be the other example, but with time dilation and combat mechanics, the game is more strategic than tactical in my understanding.

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#14

Post by silverlight »

Random but related: does anyone know of a good library (in C#, Javascript, or really anything higher-level than C preferably) that implements this? By "this" I mean a UDP-based system capable of sending both "it's stale when it's sent" data that can be dropped if it's lost and "this must be delivered" messages that will be re-sent if not delivered?

I would need it for a Unity project, so if it's Unity-ready already that would be great, but honestly at this point I'm willing to just take what's out there as a starting point and work with it.

I did find this: https://community.unity.com/t5/Asset-Store/Open-Source-UdpKi... but it's apparently unsupported now and the author has moved on to other things.

There are some other packages on the Unity Asset Store but most of them are focused around Unity-to-Unity communication, and I'm looking for something more generic (since my architecture is actually Unity-to-NodeJS currently).

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#17

Post by stincity »

mey wrote: post #12
stevebmark wrote: post #10

Part of why Tribes was such an incredible experience was it had 64 player servers. The maps were constant chaos. Haven't quite experienced anything like that since.

PlanetSide and PlanetSide 2. While hard to get into, when platoon level operations are at their best it's something I've yet to experience in another game. I expect Eve would be the other example, but with time dilation and combat mechanics, the game is more strategic than tactical in my understanding.

PS2 still going strong? I thought they were combining server populations to help increase the size of each remaining server.

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#18

Post by doctorpangloss »

silverlight wrote: post #14

Random but related: does anyone know of a good library (in C#, Javascript, or really anything higher-level than C preferably) that implements this? By "this" I mean a UDP-based system capable of sending both "it's stale when it's sent" data that can be dropped if it's lost and "this must be delivered" messages that will be re-sent if not delivered? I would need it for a Unity project, so if it's Unity-ready already t…

The Unity team plans to release a C# package for UNET low level API after the release of 5.4.0. I would caution that while it's extremely straightforward to implement those two QoS channels, you would be essentially reimplementing LLAPI and all its quirks, including queue management for a single threaded architecture.

If you are building something for mobile, consider the state of UDP support over AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint. It's poor. You will be reimplementing so much of LLAPI and Unity's relay servers that it may be more effective to port from NodeJS to Unity and run headless.

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#19

Post by buzzybee »

digi_owl wrote: post #11
aaron-lebo wrote: post #6

It still blows my mind that Tribes came out in 1998. That was a game with vehicles, easy modding (Tribes Football, RPG, Shifter, Renegades, anyone?), incredible mechanics (skiing), massive maps, recordable gameplay, a very active competitive community (OGL, 5150, players like Natural), And it was very playable on a 56k with some servers supporting 64+ players. Frankly, it puts a lot of titles with massive budgets, de…

Best i can tell, most of the dev team and budget is dedicated to the art side of the game. Meaning maps, models, sound etc. And 18 years of learning? Sorry but most of the people and companies from back then are long gone. Best i can tell there are very few game development courses out there, and fewer still focus on the network plumbing.

The difference is substantial: There are books describing some standard practices now, third-party engines will at least include some basic networking functionality, and every worthwhile book on engines will at least mention what you need to do to reasonably support multiplayer. At the time that Tribes was developed, none of that reference material existed yet - you had to do your engineering from scratch, and there were plenty of major releases that shipped a multiplayer that was essentially broken or only viable on LAN - no Internet play, server browsers, or matchmaking.

Today it's more common for multiplayer to only be broken in a limited set of ways, instead of "we are hacking away at a fundamentally wrong architecture for this problem".

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#20

Post by sleepybrett »

stevebmark wrote: post #10

Part of why Tribes was such an incredible experience was it had 64 player servers. The maps were constant chaos. Haven't quite experienced anything like that since.

The battlefield series tends to support a large number of players on very large maps. No jetpack assisted skiing though.
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